Happy Feet has been sitting in my Netflix queue for several years now, and I could never figure out why. Baby penguin + dancing + adorable = Kyle love? Well, as part of my animation fix these past few weeks, I decided to give it a shot.
It started off cute enough, the mother and father penguin getting together, the father watching their egg through the cold winter, the father dropping it, the baby hatching with a cute lil' voice to match his cute lil' tap steps. The cute lasted approximately fifteen minutes. As soon as little Mumble (voiced by Elijah Wood) hit puberty, it was as if the cuteness had been attacked and carried off by skuas, then dropped off in the middle of the ice and left to wander, because that's just what happened, journey after journey, from the search for acceptance to the search for friendship to the search for love to the search for the aliens to the search for social reform. In short, the horse on its way to Santa Barbara takes a big ol' detour up to Fillmore.
I suppose the moment I began to get lost was in the dancing. The footsteps just didn't match the feet, and the rhythms didn't really seem to sync with anything else. While this could conceivably parallel the idea of dancing to one's own beat, it just wasn't interesting. It became all the rage among the penguins, then became blasphemous, then became conventional, then became sinful multiple times, which added to the all-around choppiness of the movie.
Happy Feet may have set out to be more epic than it should have been. Creators attempted to chop up so many quest story lines and cram them into an hour and forty minutes that what I thought was intended to be a story about acceptance and self-expression turned into a do-your-part-to-save-the-world PSA with as much subtlety as a mother penguin regurgitating fish into its youngster's mouth. While it did make me feel a little sentimental when Steve Irwin had his cameo, the jumping around from Antarctica to {Florida?} and back to Antarctica completely removed me from the story and made me feel that I'd been watching a rambling ad for WWF for the past hour and a half.
Admittedly, there were some fun parts to watch, and I quite enjoyed Mumble's childhood and everything from the elephant seals to Mumble's captivity. Because of the haphazardly thrown together material surrounding those sections, interspersed with a schizophrenic soundtrack of mish-mashed pop and R&B clips, I can only give this movie three stars. Meh to the max.
It started off cute enough, the mother and father penguin getting together, the father watching their egg through the cold winter, the father dropping it, the baby hatching with a cute lil' voice to match his cute lil' tap steps. The cute lasted approximately fifteen minutes. As soon as little Mumble (voiced by Elijah Wood) hit puberty, it was as if the cuteness had been attacked and carried off by skuas, then dropped off in the middle of the ice and left to wander, because that's just what happened, journey after journey, from the search for acceptance to the search for friendship to the search for love to the search for the aliens to the search for social reform. In short, the horse on its way to Santa Barbara takes a big ol' detour up to Fillmore.
I suppose the moment I began to get lost was in the dancing. The footsteps just didn't match the feet, and the rhythms didn't really seem to sync with anything else. While this could conceivably parallel the idea of dancing to one's own beat, it just wasn't interesting. It became all the rage among the penguins, then became blasphemous, then became conventional, then became sinful multiple times, which added to the all-around choppiness of the movie.
Happy Feet may have set out to be more epic than it should have been. Creators attempted to chop up so many quest story lines and cram them into an hour and forty minutes that what I thought was intended to be a story about acceptance and self-expression turned into a do-your-part-to-save-the-world PSA with as much subtlety as a mother penguin regurgitating fish into its youngster's mouth. While it did make me feel a little sentimental when Steve Irwin had his cameo, the jumping around from Antarctica to {Florida?} and back to Antarctica completely removed me from the story and made me feel that I'd been watching a rambling ad for WWF for the past hour and a half.
Admittedly, there were some fun parts to watch, and I quite enjoyed Mumble's childhood and everything from the elephant seals to Mumble's captivity. Because of the haphazardly thrown together material surrounding those sections, interspersed with a schizophrenic soundtrack of mish-mashed pop and R&B clips, I can only give this movie three stars. Meh to the max.
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